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Stage-director Jossi Wieler and Dramaturge Sergio Morabito discuss their production of Ariadne auf Naxos

There is not only one Ariadne auf Naxos, there are two Ariadnes. It was given its world premiere in Stuttgart in 1912 as an opera in one act, following the comedy Le bourgeois gentilhomme by Molière. Then came the version that most people know today, in which the play by Molière is replaced by a prelude. Both versions have been performed in Salzburg. Why the decision in favour of the second version?

Morabito: We were very intensively preoccupied with both versions of Ariadne, and it was a difficult path until we arrived at the second version. At times we even had the feeling that in fact a third version would have to be created. We talked about that with Christoph von Dohnányi, but in the process of working arrived at the point where we were able to read anew this Ariadne II, as it were, beyond its extraordinarily contradictory and – as regards the cooperation between Strauss and Hofmannsthal – process of creation that was full of conflicts and misunderstandings. In this piece there is something that nowadays we would describe as the wrong track, that is the impression that in the prelude something is exposed that then occurs in the framework of the so-called “opera”. The prelude is about the performance conditions of the opera by the young composer but the opera we see as the second part is not the one by him. The asserted continuity between prelude and opera is pretence. It is much more appropriate to talk about two pieces, two one-act pieces, mounted together by the authors. The relationship between these two one-act pieces corresponds more to the relationship between a day reality and a dream reality. The things, persons and conflicts that turn up in the second part appear to be out of place. Attempts are often made to enrich Ariadne, which allegedly does not have much of a story, with the material provided in the prelude. That is precisely what we regard as wrong. The two parts communicate subterraneously with each other and not in the sense of linear causality.

Wieler: We talked a lot about the richest man in Vienna, in whose world the prelude takes place. We never see the man himself. He is an éminence grise, a kind of Godot or an eye of God peeping through some cracks or other – perhaps, we cannot be altogether sure. And this is the world where artists wander around, not knowing what piece is being played here. Perhaps they have arrived with one piece of hand-luggage and do not know whether they will be able to catch the last train or bus home or whether they will have to stay the night. It is also not known where this opera is to be performed: which way is the stage? Who is the person to speak to? Where are the changing rooms? Each individual is an artist in his own right, some better, some not so good but they all have the vanity and narcissistic characteristics of any performers who become increasingly obsessive, when they feel that nobody is taking any notice of them. Without a protective framework they lose all sense of orientation and are almost traumatised by their own loss of identity. They are dependent on the great patron and are lost because no clear instructions come from this “hidden god”, or when they do, they are permanently being changed, totally distant and alien to the arts, and nevertheless the artists have to react. It is like a glance into a time when artists are subjected to people with no understanding for art, where they have to move in a labyrinth of social dependencies and no longer possess any cultural structures that could give them a firm hold. That’s what we have to say about the first part.

Sergio Morabito (dramaturge, on the left of the picture), Anna Viebrock (stage sets and costumes) and Jossi Wieler (stage-director) at a technical rehearsal for Ariadne auf Naxos. Photo: Schaffler & Friese

Morabito: Two monologues by two women are of central importance in the “opera”. It is typical that they remain as monologues and that ultimately there can be no communication between the world of Ariadne and the world of Zerbinetta. Naturally this was a great challenge for Strauss, to compose a kind of patchwork of completely heterogeneous styles. This means that the two genres represented by the women opera seria and opera buffa are an expression of their isolation. We cannot interpret this characterisation merely as an aestheticising play on form. We can discover something about the difficulty or the impossibility of communication between the characters in this piece. Hofmannsthal’s dramatic concept makes the characters permanently talk at cross-purposes to one another and grope their way through misunderstandings. This is both cruel and comical. This dramaturgy of permanent misunderstanding is marked to differing degrees in the prelude and opera and thus creates a paradoxical link between them.

Wieler: The emotional state, the trauma, the depression of someone like Ariadne seems to me to be something very much of the present: this kind of neurotic isolation. And even her encounter with Bacchus at the end of the opera is only possible because they mutually fail to recognise one another. Both are marked by the wounds of their past and project them on to the other.
At first Ariadne hallucinates that Theseus, the man who left her, has come back in the form of Bacchus, and she then stylises him as the god of death. And pubertal Bacchus is both fleeing from and at the same time searching for Circe with whom he has just had his first sexual experience. The attempts by Bacchus and Ariadne to approach one another – with all existential insecurity and despair – are not without a certain tragicomic element.

Morabito: A decisive point in working in opera is that we have the chance to perceive anew what is apparently well-known music. One of stage-designer Anna Viebrock’s qualities is her ability to associate specific “resonance areas” – in the actual and figurative sense – with certain music.
In a complicated process based on our conversations and her own search she invents a space, shows us pictures and photos and then builds a model, and suddenly we begin to re-experience the music in this space and understand it from a new perspective.